Marcus Waldman

A love of innovation and solving novel problems has always been a strong part of my core values. Early in my career, I worked at a primarily mainframe “green screen” shop. Our users needed access to modern word-processing functionality, so, starting from scratch with a second-generation language not known for its GUI capabilities, I built an IBM mainframe-native word processor. Correctly predicting that web applications were the future, I then taught myself Java and web-server technologies. At a company that relied entirely on terminal-based interfaces, I established the Client Application department. I built an employee web portal and web interfaces for the underlying mainframe applications from the ground up, eventually becoming Supervisor of the Client Application team. I later moved from my in-house supervisor position back into an individual-contributor role at a product-focused company to learn the software-product development industry. After several years, I was ready to return to leadership. I led multiple development teams focused on migrating a monolithic application to an event-driven microservices platform designed for significant growth and scalability. The next step in my career led organically into senior management. I led engineering managers through the transformation of an engineering department into truly cross-functional product teams while improving the use of budgets, resources, and organizational knowledge. I also introduced measurable operating practices, developed engineering leaders, and aligned team structures with business and product priorities. Today, as an Engineering Director at American Express, I lead cross-functional engineering teams and frontline managers responsible for customer-facing Restaurant Reservations and Restaurant Management platforms. I set technical direction across Java, Python, React, AWS, and GCP while partnering with product and business leaders to balance feature delivery with reliability, scalability, and long-term maintainability. I develop engineers and emerging managers and apply AI tools—including Cursor, ChatGPT, custom GPTs, and reusable AI skills—to improve software understanding, development, project management, and engineering workflows. Throughout my career, I have remained motivated by opportunities to learn, modernize complex systems, develop talented people, and solve meaningful business problems through technology. I look forward to the next chapter and to the new knowledge, challenges, and experiences it will bring.